Book Note

Well-Founded Fear, by Tom LeClair, Olin Frederick, Inc., Dunkirk, NY (2000).

Casay Mahan, a former fellow of the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights, is the protagonist of this novel. Attorney Mahan takes a leave from her law firm to volunteer in the Athens office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She becomes involved in Kurdish cases and this well-plotted novel explores the plight of the Kurds in Turkey, and takes the reader into the workings of the asylum process.

Protect and Defend, by Richard North Patterson, Knopf: New York (2000).

This novel is a "page-turner" and expertly explicates the legal, moral, and political issues surrounding late-term abortions and parental consent laws.

Safe Motherhood: A Woman's Human Rights, by Rebecca J. Cook, Bernard M. Dickens, O. Andrew F. Wilson & Susan E. Scarrow (World Health Organization 2001) 169 pp.

This report considers how human rights laws can be applied to relieve the estimated 1,400 deaths worldwide that occur every day; an annual mortality rate of 515,000, that women suffer because they are pregnant. Human rights principles have long been established in national constitutional and other laws and in regional and international human rights treaties to which nations voluntarily commit themselves. The intention of the report is to facilitate initiatives by governmental agencies, nongovernmental groups and, for instance, international organizations to foster compliance with human rights in order to protect, respect and fulfil women's rights to safe motherhood.

The report outlines how the dimensions of unsafe motherhood can be measured and comprehended, and how causes can be identified by reference to medical, health system, and sociolegal factors. It introduces human rights laws by identifying specific human rights that can be applied to advance safe motherhood. The rights are shown to interact with each other, and for purposes of discussion, they are clustered in the following ways:

-- rights to life, survival and security;
-- rights relating to maternity and health;
-- rights to nondiscrimination and due respect for difference; and
-- rights to information and education relevant to women's health protection during pregnancy and childbirth.

The setting of performance standards for monitoring compliance with rights relevant to reproductive health, and availability and use of obstetric services is addressed. In conclusion, the report considers several strategies to encourage professional, institutional, and governmental implementation of the various human rights in national and international laws relevant to reduction of unsafe motherhood, and to enable women to go through pregnancy and childbirth safely.

Available from Department of Reproductive Health and Research, World Health Organization, 1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland or via e-mail from: lamberts @who.ch.

The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter, by Albie Sachs (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 2000).

In 1988 in Mozambique a car bomb physically maimed Albie Sachs, a key white South African lawyer within the hierarchy of the African National Congress. Sachs details his struggle to overcome the physical and psychological effects, and to return to the struggle for a new South Africa. Sachs, now a member of the Constitutional Court, recalls with much detail his inner thoughts as he set his goal on defeating the enemy by overcoming adversity and returning to the struggle for a just nonracial South Africa.

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